The historical list of laureates provides an odd mix of proper poets and political placemen who, regardless of talent, have almost always proved an irresistible target for the barbs of their peers. The term "laureate" has been appended to court poets since the time of Edward IV at least, but the first appointment to the post in something like the modern sense came in 1670, when John Dryden (laureate 1670-89) was, by grant of letters patent, awarded a pension of £200 and a butt of canary wine. The appointment was not for life, but dependent on the vagaries of court politics. After the glorious revolution, Dryden, unable to countenance the new Whig supremacy, was replaced by his great rival Thomas Shadwell (1689-92), whom he had mocked in the satire Mac Flecknoe: "Shadwell alone, of all my Sons, is he / Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity." The post came with specific duties: to compose an ode for the sovereign's birthday and another for new year's day. Shadwell died after just three years, and was replaced by Dryden's one-time collaborator (and fellow Tory) Nahum Tate (1692-1715), who is remembered chiefly for butchering King Lear by threading into it a love story between Cordelia and Edgar and giving it a happy ending.

On Tate's death the job passed, briefly, to another playwright, Nicholas Rowe (1715-18) - George I was, apparently, a great fan of his translations of Lucan. As one critic wrote, "This Rowe is a great Whig, and but a mean poet." When he died, at the age of 44, he was succeeded by the youngest man to hold the post, the 30-year-old Laurence Eusden (1718-30). Both he and his successor, the actor, stage-manager, playwright and, occasionally, poet Colley Cibber (1730-57), were cruelly lampooned by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad. After Cibber, the leading candidate for succession - Thomas Gray - declined the honour. He would, he wrote, "rather be sergeant trumpeter or pin-maker to the palace". The laurels passed instead to William Whitehead (1757-85), who turned out his "quit-rent odes" and "pepper-corns of praise" as required. Another refusal (by Gray's literary executor, William Mason) in 1785 propelled Thomas Warton (1785-90), Oxford professor of poetry, into the job. His nature poems and use of ballad form foreshadow the later developments of romanticism. In 1790 Henry James Pye (1790-1813), a former MP, became the first laureate to draw a fixed salary (£27pa) instead of the usual canary wine.

The appointment of Robert Southey (1813-43) showed again how the establishment's embrace of a one-time radical provided scope for attack by rivals. In his scornful dedication of Don Juan to Southey, Byron wrote: "You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know, / At being disappointed in your wish / To supersede all warblers here below, / And be the only Blackbird in the dish". The 72-year-old William Wordsworth (1843-50), another "epic renegade" in Byron's words, followed, having been assured by Robert Peel that he wouldn't actually have to write anything. Seven years later, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1850-92) began the longest tenure of any laureate. His official work was fairly plodding, but "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) rebuts any notion that the national poet must, by definition, provide unthinking support to the establishment.

The post then fell vacant for four years, supposedly because of a dearth of qualified candidates (what about Algernon Swinburne or Christina Rossetti?), until Alfred Austin (1896-1913) got the job. Alongside Pye, he is often seen as the worst of the bunch - his verses were lampooned in Punch and he was derided as "the last minstrel of Toryism". After the dutifully conventional Robert Bridges(1913-30), the only medical doctor to hold the post, and John Masefield (1930-67), a tireless booster for poetry, the rest of the 20th century saw a succession of decent practitioners: C Day Lewis (1967-72), whose posthumous reputation has suffered unjustly (and he still has no memorial in Poets' Corner); John Betjeman (1972-84), who found the role burdensome from the start ("Oh God, the Royal poem!!" he wrote in 1973. "Send the Holy Ghost to help me over that fence"); and Ted Hughes (1984-99), who took the job after Philip Larkin turned it down and, unusually, ended with his reputation enhanced. He, more than many of his predecessors, lived up to Byron's description of Milton: "He deign'd not to belie his soul in songs, / Nor turn his very talent to a crime".